Drawing uncertainty

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Monthly Archives: January 2012

I have quite a bit more work to do before the new instruments are worth posting so here is a picture of Instruments Five and Six being assembled and Instruments Four being refitted. The white instrument in the middle foreground is an instrument four and the red one to its right is an instrument five. Behind them on the back worktop (in a studio that is normally used by students – this was taken in the summer before last) is Instrument Six. The instruments lined up on the left are mostly Instrument Fives with one Instrument Four. Several people have asked me how large the instruments are, so this gives some idea of the scale. Each one will fit in a one metre cube.

This is a stereoscopic pair, so if you go cross-eyed you should be able to resolve the scene in 3D, which makes it much clearer. If you are having difficulty resolving it make the image smaller on the screen.

The exhibition Drawing By Drawing is made in memory of Svein Tonsager and is at the Danish Architecture Centre at the time of posting. Lots of great drawings and nicely shown. My contribution is shown in the bottom image – the six pairs of stereoscopic drawings from the third body project. More information a couple of posts down. All images from the DAC.

These two studies are from 1993 and follow on from the long yellow drawing at the end of the post before last. The vertical yellow lines in that drawing were a note that the construction did not include an idea of context, and these were attempts to imagine how signals in the ether would register on the walls of the architecture (which were sensitive to electronic signals in our skin). As before, these are stereoscopic pairs and make more sense seen in 3D.

This exhibition opened last week at the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen. It is a celebration of Svein Tonsager, who was a very influential teacher at the Architecture School in Aarhus. The exhibition includes work by many of the people he had regular contact with or invited to speak in Aarhus. There is a mouth-watering array of drawings by people like Peter Cook, Neil Denari, Anders Abraham, C.J. Lim, Diller and Scofidio+Renfro, Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne, Mike Webb, Sverre Fehn, Peter Wilson, John Hejduk, Christine Hawley, Carsten Jule Christiansen, Neil Spiller, Carsten Thau, Leslie Van Deuzer, Steven Holl, Dan Hoffman, Kjeld Vindum, Ben Van Berkel, Chris Thurlebourne, Alberto Perez -Gomez, Andy Bow, Juhani Pallasmaa, Michael Sorkin, Lebbeus Woods etc. My contribution is the set of drawings for the third body project:

The drawing above ( and also the two images below) is a test drawing made around 1999 as an attempt to study the potential of anamorphic projection as a way of spatialising the picture plane. It is a composite between three-dimensional moving parts (lower right hand side, that were bolted to the drawing an a space that was also milled out into the drawing surface) and the drawing. The image below shows a detail of the three-dimensional elements. The image is made to see how tolerant an image could be to various positions of viewing and still make sense from that position (as opposed to compensating for the parallactic deviation from the frontal view). In other words, as you moved round the drawing the question was does the image still make sense as it is seen from that position, while still making sense when seen from from a frontal position. The third image shows a view from the left hand side of the image.

Detail (Nat Chard)

Anamorphic view

The main figure, a diaphanous form, is related to a number of studies I had made in 1992 and 1992 looking at the space we might imagine to be our own, a sort of spatial projection. The first two drawings below are studies for two people walking together. I have posted the final drawing before but this is a recent scan off a slide that I recently cleaned up a bit, and shows the drawing better than the earlier version.

This is a frame I welded up for a kitchen table, to include a gas cooker, with a number of surfaces that could either adjust for height, a shift between worktop and table height or anything in between, or swing out to fit a space in the room it was made for when there were fewer people and a more intimate table seemed appropriate. The various adjustable parts would transmit their condition to other pieces in the apartment, redrawing the space in realtime. It has a similar fascination to the sink (https://natchard.com/2011/09/16/drawing-sink/) and the full scale picture plane (https://natchard.com/2011/10/26/full-scale-picture-plane/) in trying to draw space at it happens rather than in advance. For quite bizarre reasons beyond my control I was unable to access the workshop during the time I had to work on the project and as my family’s patience wore out I installed a flat pack kitchen as an interim measure. We subsequently moved and so the project was never completed.

At the time this picture was taken the feet had not been added. Cupboards would have fitted between the frames.